High praise for low-life horse racing

Jaimy Gordon’s novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award, makes poetry out of the low life at a seedy racetrack | Jamie Squire/Getty Images

LORD OF MISRULE
Jaimy Gordon

Last month’s National Book Award winner for fiction provoked as much surprise in the American literary world as Joanna Skibsrud’s Giller Prize win for The Sentimentalists. Like Skibsrud’s novel, Gordon’s was published by a small press originally planning a tiny print run. Scant few had actually read the book, published just days before the Awards. But the prize win for Lord of Misrule, a multi-viewpoint narrative of low-level horse racing, was not just well deserved, but a welcome validation of literary fiction’s greatest ambitions.

Gordon’s setting is Indian Mound Downs, a West Virginia racetrack that’s gone to seed in the already grim and economically depressed 1970s. Broken-down, aging horses are raced for scant winnings by jockeys and trainers looking for a quick score rather than for glory and riches. In a more commercially minded writer’s hands, the motivations of characters like horseman Tommy Hansel, groomsman Medicine Ed and menacing trainer Joe Dale Bigg would be mere props for race outcomes and suspense over whether criminal enterprise will pay off or trigger senseless violence.

All of these events happen, more or less, though Gordon seems to wink at standard storytelling conventions. “I can’t be playing around with gangsters,” says Maggie, a horseman’s girlfriend and the novel’s emotional centre. “I keep thinking I’m in a movie and then I realize I could get killed.” Instead, Lord of Misrule makes poetry out of low life through passages of gorgeous, idiosyncratic prose. A female jockey is described as “not ugly but like something born between mud and river water, like something out of a creek swamp.” Faces are “draggyfied” and featherbeds have “sweat-damp canyons.”

“Horse racing is not no science . . . ma’fact it’s more like religion,” says Medicine Ed in pungent country dialect, and as Gordon masterfully renders this world in Lord of Misrule, a prosaic sport becomes a higher power to believe in.
- SARAH WEINMAN

CLEOPATRA: A LIFE
Stacy Schiff

If, as rumoured, Angelina Jolie has snagged the central role in the movie adaptation of Stacy Schiff’s myth-shattering depiction of Egypt’s final pharaoh, audiences should know one thing: whoever cast the actress utterly missed the point of the compelling biography. Schiff’s Cleopatra is no glam seductress, nor is she an Elizabeth Taylor-esque (or Angelina Jolie-esque) femme fatale. Rather, the monarch born in 69 BCE, who ruled an empire for nearly 22 years, captivated and governed not with beauty but wit, intellect and flair for image-making spectacle. An educated, multi-lingual queen, she built a fleet, controlled a currency, suppressed insurrections and averted famine. A canny strategist, her dalliances with Julius Caesar, with whom she had one child, and Mark Anthony, with whom she had three, were empire-preserving alliances. Even her death, which ushered in the rise of the Roman Empire, is recast: she used poison rather than the more symbolically freighted asp to do herself in.

Only a biographer as accomplished as Schiff would dare to reclaim history from the victors. No papyri from the period survive; nothing of ancient Alexandria exists above ground. Relying on hieroglyphics, coinage, and multiple historical texts, Schiff retells a story that until now she points out has been the “joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.” The resulting narrative is far less lurid—and far more scholarly—though there’s still plenty of drama, including Cleopatra smuggling herself in a sack to meet Caesar.

Far more engaging is Schiff’s vivid depiction of Alexandria as the “Paris of the ancient world,” a luxurious cultural hub that put then-provincial Rome to shame. Women were educated and possessed autonomy and power unequalled in the West until the 20th century. The Roman custom of “horse trading” women would not have occurred among the Ptolemies, Schiff writes. Given such attitudes, it’s unsurprising that Cleopatra’s power was reduced to her beauty and sexual wiles. As Schiff writes, the great ruler “unsettles more as a sage than a seductress.” If casting choices offer any indication, she still does.
- ANNE KINGSTON